“Sometimes, films set in and around Hollywood manage to capture a sense about the place that’s strange and uncanny, a place in love with its past and afraid of its future, leaving nothing but ghosts behind to haunt the hills, and to walk the empty mansions.”
“The characters in ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,’ ‘Smithereens’ and ‘Suburbia’ find in punk rock a convenient shorthand for authenticity, a posture which presages its eventual absorption into the very mechanisms it sets out to oppose.”
“Just as Reed’s real-life contemporaries reflect on the revolutionary ideals of their era in ‘Reds,’ Beatty bears witness to his own, staring down a massive canvas of his contemporaries’ successes and failures, the romance of their innovations and the exclusionary nature of their excess.”
“‘Freddy vs. Jason’ is — like almost all horror movies — a signpost for the anxieties of an era, looking much like the prestige horror movies of today will look from the vantage point of the next decade.”
“Here’s to hoping that Meredith Hagner will continue to make us laugh while taking her ludicrous characters seriously for many more years, just like Marilyn Monroe did before her.”
“There has always been a conflict at play in Nicholson’s screen presence: between ‘Nicholson’ and ‘Jack.’ The desire to be taken seriously and the lure of the riotous Jack persona have always done battle across his decades of stardom.”